Category Archives: churnalism

OUseful: Data Referenced Journalism and the Media – Still a Long Way to Go Yet?

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Tony Hirst: "we need data press officers as well as data journalists. Their job would be to put together the tools that support the data churnalist in taking the raw data and producing statistical charts and interpretation from it. Just like the ministerial quote can be reused by the journalist, so the data press pack can be used to hep the journalist get some graphs out there to help them illustrate the story."

SF Weekly: Britain’s Daily Mail Rips Off SF Weekly Cover Story

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The SF Weekly accuses the Daily Mail website of churnalism and poor attribution after the tabloid's site rehashed one of its stories: "There is absolutely no original reporting in the entire Daily Mail piece. Apparently the reporter thought he or she was absolved via a quick "SFWeekly.com reports" in the 18th paragraph. No link or anything. ... Roy Peter Clark, a senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, a journalism ethics think tank: "Linking is one of the simplest and oldest strategies. ... I think the reason you might not link is you don't want to call attention to how close your version is to the one you're linking to. It may be a sign that someone knows that they're pirating the work."

currybetdotnet: ‘Do online newspapers have a future in a Digital Britain’ – MTM London round-table session

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Martin Belam: on the MTM London "One of the most telling quotes during the presentation for me was "There are too many people in the media. You don't need 25 versions of the same story". There were some incredulous laughs in the audience at this assertion, but I personally think it was one of the more valid points. We know we face over-supply of news, and almost infinite supply of online advertising inventory, so where is the business logic in the infinite online re-purposing of press releases and agency copy?"

ZDNet.com: Between the Lines: AP eyes news aggregators; Risks exposing its lack of value add

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Larry Dignan: "I’m not going to sweat AP’s search for rules of engagement for one simple reason: I link to the real source material, which more often than not is a press release. On any given day you can easily bypass AP. And if the AP wants to find a better subscriber business model it needs to adhere to two words: Add value."

Guardian: Bad Science: How the Sun boobed over Britney Spears equation

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Ben Goldacre: "[M]y frighteningly anal chums at the Apathy Sketchpad blog have performed quantitative analysis on this question, by doggedly documenting every single equation story to appear in the Telegraph, a serious paper that covers science properly. ... These stories tell us nothing about science. They are what PR companies call 'advertising equivalent exposure' ... "

Publishing 2.0: Why not writing a story is innovation

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"Newsrooms no longer have the luxury of wasting resources on non-stories — on “the journalism of filling space and time,” as Jeff Jarvis put it. They no longer have the luxury, in an information-overload world, of wasting readers’ time with non-stories or information readers already know. ... Filler news can take many forms. ... I would add: many stories based on (or directly lifted from) press releases; one-sentence news like stock market updates, shuttle takeoffs, and incremental updates of previous stories; many politics-as-process stories." (HT: Patrick Smith)

Guardian: ‘With the staff we’ve got, we do the best we can’

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Media Guardian visits the Leigh Journal, a local Newsquest weekly which is down to two staff: "When Hulme and Gomm discuss their professional pasts, they sound wistful. The job of putting the paper out means they haven't got the time to directly report on court proceedings and council meetings, or cultivate off-the-record sources. In more callow hands, their paper would surely have tumbled into the kind of hacked-out "churnalism" decried in Nick Davies's book Flat Earth News - but as they see it, what saves them is the spiderweb of sources amassed during their working lives. ... "